Can any of you feel 2G/GSM radio?

Slightly off topic - am I the only person who can feel (as in a distinct sensation in the side of my head) when my phone has dropped to 2G? It's quite unpleasant, therefore I tend to use a bluetooth or wired headset if it's not 3G. If it's a long call on 3G I tend to use a headset anyway as I can't be bothered to hold the phone up till the blood drains out of my arm.

FYI - I get a sensation on the side of my scalp above the ears on the side I'm holding the phone after a few seconds exposure. Maybe I'm just sensitive to my nerve endings being microwaved...

Tinfoil sweatband time?

On topic - my commute from Wimbledon Common to Waterloo (train from Putney) has several distinct areas of no signal, for no obvious reasons such as obstructions. Rubbish networks the lot of them. I'm on Vodafone at the mo.

Re: Point of order

Hang on, back in the 90's I'm sure Silicon Graphics did some even bigger VR headsets for their fantastically expensive kit. In fact, I almost had the chance to try one for a student project at uni, only to find it was broken by the time I got my turn. ;-(

It was an experiment on how people navigated in VR environments and after too many hours of Doom in our computing lab, I was happily strafing round corners which was a shame as there were no weapons in the VR model...

@ RyokuMas

Err, we already did that; re-read the sentence, I said we upgraded it. Normal auto-fire rates were waaay slower, hence the mod. It basically maxed out the input and there were no gaps in the stream of fire at all!

Re: you couldn't maintain the rate of fire required without them.

Early hardware modding for Xenon II on the ST

Reminds me that my brother did a mod on one of our joysticks to upgrade the auto-fire to 255 shots per second. You ended up with a hose-like continuous stream of shots up the screen and gave you awesome firepower. It did make it rather easier to finish the game and saved yet another busted joystick fire button - happy days!

Think it involved changing the resistor the auto-fire used and we'd seen it in one of the gaming mags IIRC.

There was a PC port of Xenon II I downloaded awhile back too - only 320x240 though. Could do with a full HD resolution version & multi-channel sound to bring it up to date..!

New type of suicide bomber!

You've had explosive belts, bikes, cars, buses, vans, trucks and planes - bring on the era of the suicide balloonist*

Stick a man in a basket with a load of helium balloons, a large fan and a one way ticket to paradise and they'll be floating up to an elevated launch platform to shoot at the big floating infidel in the sky. A couple of RPGs and they have air-to-air missiles!

* I didn't say this would be likely to work - it would be total luck if they got within a 10K of an airship, even if they knew where it was first.

@Jim Morrow - no hindsight required!

Actually, | recall at the time several articles pointing out it was bloody stupid to announce to the World + dog the UK was about to flog half its gold reserve.

Other nations sold some of theirs at around the same time, but had the good sense not to announce it first and drip fed it into the market.

Brown's stupidity was to dump it in one go, thereby getting the worst possible price - same as happens when there's a surplus of oil on the market > price goes down, simple economics of supply & demand. Doesn't take a genius to work that out, and as I recall GB went against the direct advice of the Treasury...

bio-warfare 'R' us

The biological warfare method was suggested in the press years ago, and I thought at the time we should have just gone ahead and done it. Looks like they finally got the green light - any crop-dusting drones out there?

It's a naturally occuring infection of poppies and far more targetted than an agent orange type mess so you don't end up with mutated wildlife...

For health use, they just need to quarantine a region and pay the farmers the going pharmaceutical rate for it. The rest can be guided towards growing something more beneficial to all.

More details please...

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

There's a saying, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" and depending on your cultural and religious upbringing, some UK norms could be considered obscene, bizarre or disgusting. And who the hell are the IWF to judge?! I don't remember voting them into government - did the rest of you?

Until they subject themselves to full public scrutiny and respond to the public will, they aren't anything but another special interests group regardless of what good they are trying to do.

In an environment as diverse as the internet, to accept the blinkers of one organisation looking from a specific point of view strikes me as short-sighted at best, bloody stupid at worst.

Like the great firewall of Oz, stupidity knows no bounds. We're heading for a society where you can't look at naked pictures of yourself as a baby cause they're now 'child porn' - idiots!

Context, context, context people, that's what determines what is 'child porn' and what are merely embarrasing photos of your childhood.

And until they put thoughtcrimes into UK law, they can kiss my ass if they think I'll change they way I tell good from bad.

The producers of actual child porn make very good candidates for castration by wooden spoon though...

Forever more...

Tablet XP

I've had a Tosh M200 Tablet for the last 5 years and it has now travelled the world with me. Originally bought as a high-end laptop/tablet with hi-res screen (12" 1400*1050 - can't get that any more!) it's spent more time with me than my other half, much to her annoyance...

In my experience there are a few things they will have to ace if this is to work:

1) Hi-res display: The major failings of most current laptops/tablets are the low dpi of their screens. It's the reason I can't replace mine, the current crop of widescreen TFTs are a poor 1200*800 max, which frankly has pixels the size of my teenage spots. The whole point of a tablet is that when you write with the stylus, you can't SEE the individual pixels - it's supposed to emulate paper, not an etch-a-sketch!

2) Usable outdoors, in daylight: Mine is great indoors, but useless in sunlight as the backlight ain't nearly bright enough too, so needs to be transflective or something.

3) Bloody good Voice Recognition: Handwriting recognition in XP amazed me with it's accuracy when I got mine, even though I can barely read my scribbles, so that's good to go already. Voice recognition is way harder, and a pain to train as well. Needs to be highly context sensitive to work well e.g. read, red, Redd, etc. The M200 has 3 mics on the screen to do noise cancelling, so an apple tablet would need a similar setup to work well. Unfortunately MS in their stupidity broke the VR in Office 2007 and said F&$k off and buy Vista if you want to use it again...

4) Weight: Mine is <2kg but still starts to strain the arm when writing for awhile. Theirs will need to be ~1kg for comfort. Optional Bluetooth keyboard option to save weight anyone?

5) Battery life: As a pen & paper replacement, it'll need to last long enough to get a day's work out of it - either very smart power management or amazing batteries are required.